


the saints can't help me now

by lovelit



Category: Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Folklore, Genderswap, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-09-27 04:33:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20401732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelit/pseuds/lovelit
Summary: Red suspected she knew the stories of Little Red better than most - she’d been named for her, after all, and her mother had repeated the stories to her long past the point where most children’s mothers only told them to remember the wolf, and trusted that they knew the stories well enough to finish the rest in their own heads. Had told her tales of Little Red’s whole life, at least as Red’s mother said it had gone.“We’re her descendants, you know,” her mother told her in the dark of night by the fireplace, and when Red was a child it had been something magical to think about, to think of a legend’s blood running through her veins.





	the saints can't help me now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedRumRaver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRumRaver/gifts).

Everyone knew there was a wolf in the woods. For as long as Red could remember, it had been something repeated whenever someone had to enter the forest. 

_Remember the wolf in the woods. Only the path is safe. Remember the wolf in the woods._

You’d say it whenever someone was journeying through the woods, like a prayer, and then hope that they stuck to the path and came back. Sometimes they never did, and the village would light the candles and ring the bells and whisper amongst themselves that _he must have left the path, must have forgotten the wolf in the woods_. 

And sometimes outsiders came into the village from the woods, and the village council would descend on them to check for the wolf - to check their eyes, their ears, their hands, their teeth - and to drive them away if there was the slightest hint that they weren’t what they said they were. Everyone knew the old stories, after all, the legend of Little Red and her grandmother, and the wolf that had worn her skin and tried to devour the girl.

Red suspected she knew the stories of Little Red better than most - she’d been named for her, after all, and her mother had repeated the stories to her long past the point where most children’s mothers only told them to remember the wolf, and trusted that they knew the stories well enough to finish the rest in their own heads. Had told her tales of Little Red’s whole life, at least as Red’s mother said it had gone.

“We’re her descendants, you know,” her mother told her in the dark of night by the fireplace, and when Red was a child it had been something magical to think about, to think of a legend’s blood running through her veins. But now Red was an adult, and she’d heard those words so many times they barely sounded like words anymore. And besides that, the village was so small - who _wasn’t_ descended from Little Red, probably, if she’d really lived as long ago as the tales said? And what was so special about your great-great-great-etcetera grandmother having nearly been eaten by a wolf, really? Red’s uncle had nearly been killed by a boar when she was ten, and nobody was flocking around the fireside at night to tell tales of him.

It was the night before Red’s twenty-second birthday when her frustrations finally came to a head. Maybe it was something about the age; Little Red had been eleven when the wolf had tried to take her, the legends said, and Red felt sometimes as though her mother was disappointed, just a little, that Red had gotten to twice the girl’s age without ever making a name for herself. Maybe it was overhearing the butcher’s son seeking her father’s permission to ask for her hand in marriage on her birthday, and realizing that she’d have to say yes if she let him ask, for all that she had no interest in the man at all - or any man, for that matter.

Maybe it was just the moon, hung full and bright in the winter sky above the village.

Whatever it was, something that night drew Red out of her bedroom window into the dark, sneaking across the village by the light of the moon until she reached the edge of the woods.

Nobody was near them, not with the moon so bright and the skies so dark, and that suited Red just fine. She stole onto the path and followed it for several minutes until the village had been completely swallowed up behind her into the dark, and then stopped and turned about herself.

She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for, until a voice called out to her from the trees, “Good evening to you, Little Red.”

The voice was a woman’s, rich and quiet and nothing like Red had ever imagined from all the stories she’d heard, and yet something in her knew it all the same.

It was only natural, then, for Red to recite back, “Thank you, wolf.”

There was a quiet, barked laugh that Red wasn’t entirely convinced she hadn’t imagined, and then the voice said, “Where are you going so late, Little Red?”

She couldn’t follow the story’s script here, having no living grandmothers and certainly not ones who lived through the woods, so here Red smiled and said, instead, “To nowhere and everywhere, dear wolf.”

A shape finally peeled away from the shadows, though the wolf didn’t emerge from the trees enough to see more than her faint silhouette; a woman taller than the men in the village, with a wolf’s ears atop her head and a wolf’s tail waving behind her, and her teeth bared in a grin that just barely showed in the moonlight.

“And what are you carrying under your apron?”

“Only myself, dear wolf.”

The wolf’s grin grew wider, her teeth impossibly sharp, and she held out a hand with nails like claws.

“Then come a little closer, Little Red, and let me see what you bring with you to nowhere and everywhere.”

Red met the wolf’s smile with one of her own, her own blunt human teeth bared just as much as the wolf’s fangs, and reached out to take the hand.

It felt like hours that the wolf led Red through the woods, further and further from the path, but somehow she knew that it hadn’t been. That the hours she’d spent being led through the undergrowth, carefully guided around tangled roots and over fallen logs, translated to nothing in the world outside. That the woods were a world of their own, disconnected and strange, and every step Red took brought her further into that world and further from everything she’d known until now.

Except for the stories, the ones she’d heard so many times that she knew them in her blood.

When the wolf finally stopped walking they were in a clearing filled with wildflowers, the petals tinted silver in the light of the moon that seemed to hang directly above them. Under the light and now that they’d stopped moving, Red was finally able to look at the wolf properly as she turned to face her.

She was tall, that much had been clear before, and made taller by the way she walked on her toes like the wolf she was rather than flat-footed like a real human. Her hair hung in a long mess down her back, silvery-gray despite her apparent youth - she looked older than Red, but only by a few years at most - and matched by the soft-looking hair that Red could see spread across her pale skin. It was more like a man’s than a woman’s with the way it collected thick along her limbs and across her chest, above small breasts that she’d left uncovered without a hint of self-consciousness. Her breasts weren’t the only thing uncovered, though; when Red’s gaze dropped lower she finally realized that the wolf was entirely naked, utterly comfortable in that nakedness and only raising one thick eyebrow when Red looked back up at her face.

“I believe, Little Red,” the wolf said, “That you were going to let me see what you bring with you to nowhere and everywhere. And now here we are, after all, nowhere and everywhere and your gifts brought, and without my seeing so much as a glimpse of them from below their wrappings!”

Another might have been frightened. On another night, Red might have been frightened herself. But on this night, surrounded by sweet-scented flowers and with the moon high above her, Red caught the thread of the game the wolf was playing and only smiled, only bared her blunt little human teeth.

“I apologize for any offence, but it would be awfully improper to open gifts before they reach their intended place, would it not?”

The wolf snapped her own teeth, delight shining in her amber eyes. “But of course! It seems the full moon has quite removed my manners with excitement. Will you forgive me, Little Red, and allow me to unwrap your gifts now that they’ve reached their destination?”

“You’re forgiven, dear wolf. But I fear in your excitement you would bare the gifts with no thought for savoring the unwrapping itself, and that won’t do at all.” She paused, taking a breath to brace herself, and then carried on, “I will show you myself, and then the wrappings can be saved to remember the gifts.”

She took a breath, bracing, and then began to slowly remove her clothes, letting the fabric drop down to pool on the ground at her feet. Soon enough she was naked in the cold night air and stepping forward toward the wolf, whose eyes were flicking hungrily over her body.

“What _beautiful_ gifts you bring, Little Red,” she said, and then she was surging forward in a rush to stop less than an inch away from Red. Close enough to reach out and skirt her claws over Red’s skin, too light to cut but firm enough to raise gooseflesh wherever she touched. Close enough that Red would only have to lean her head forward just so and she would be able to touch her mouth to the wolf’s breasts, if she was so inclined.

She had never been so inclined to anything like that before, but she found that here and now she was, and found too that when she did it there was no resistance; instead, the wolf made a rumbling noise deep in her chest and arched to push her chest towards Red, as Red kissed at her breast and then, slowly, moved to suck at one of her nipples. That got her an approving growl, and the wolf’s fingers threading into her hair to hold her in place and then, after a short while, to tug at her insistently until she repeated the sucking on the other side.

Eventually the wolf pulled back, though, looking over Red again and making her flush with self-consciousness and anticipation both, and then sank to her knees and surged forward again.

Red barely had time to react before the wolf was spreading her legs and pushing her face up between them, and then even less time to react before she felt a hot tongue pressing between her folds to rub over her, to circle around her clit and then press just barely inside her before the wolf was back to sucking at her clit. The sensation was like nothing Red had ever felt before, and it made her jerk her hips and gasp and moan with it, the sounds loud against the quiet of the night. After a particularly hard jerk of her hips, the wolf reached up to grab at Red’s ass, claws pressed firm against the flesh as she held Red in place; forced her still and kept up the motions of her lips and tongue until it was near unbearable, until every sensation was almost too much and she couldn’t tell whether she wanted to squirm into or away from it, only that the wolf’s tightening grip on her ass kept her still no matter what. 

Kept her teetering on some precipice, squirming and shuddering and with her clit pulsing with every rapid beat of her heart, with every too-sharp press of claws against the flesh of her ass making her gasp in pleasure-pain-pleasure, with her own hands knotting into the wolf’s hair close enough to feel the way her ears twitched against them whenever Red made a noise. It felt like forever that she spent like that, always close but never quite going over that precipice, before the wolf grazed her teeth just barely over Red’s clit and the half-realized threat of pain was suddenly and abruptly enough. Enough to have her coming with a final sharp cry, to have her clenching around nothing and sensitive nearly to tears when the wolf’s tongue immediately moved to lap at her, to lick over her again and again while only the claws gripping at her ass and the wolf’s strength kept her upright on her shaking legs.

When the wolf was apparently content to stop licking over Red, she guided her down to sit amongst the wildflowers and sat back to grin at her, to bare those sharp fangs at her in glee.

“Such a princely gift you brought to this place, Little Red, but I hope my thanks did it justice?”

Red was still dreadfully short of breath, but she matched the wolf’s grin with a blunt, human grin of her own. “Absolutely, dear wolf, and more than that.”

The wolf’s grin widened, and she began to lean in closer. “And it occurs to me,” she went on, “That it’s awfully improper to return a gift, particularly one so fine as all this.”

It was impossible not to catch the wolf’s meaning, not with her smile so sharp in the moonlight and her eyes so bright in the night and the way she lifted one hand to settle it slowly, possessively, against Red’s thigh. And Red thought of the village; of her mother and father and the butcher’s boy, of a life of nothing but producing children and telling them scary stories about the woods, and there was no question of it.

Red didn’t want to hear or tell scary stories about the woods anymore. She wanted to become the stories, like the wolf leaning towards her.

So she said, “It _would_ be awfully improper to return my gifts, dear wolf, and I would be awfully offended.”

The wolf barked out a laugh and leaned down, stopping with her mouth practically touching the inside of Red’s thigh and lifting her eyes to Red’s to say, “They’ll have to change the legends.”

“So they will,” Red agreed, and that was apparently the last confirmation the wolf needed before she sank her teeth into the flesh, leaving a bloodied bite there that Red knew would mark for the rest of her days. That claimed her, that made the moon sing above her, that made her part of a legend much better than being the descendant of a girl who nearly died in the woods.

Pulling the wolf up, she kissed her and tasted her own blood in her mouth, and when she pulled back she grinned at her; bared teeth that weren’t blunt and human and then lifted her head to sing back at the moon with the wolf before her.

(_Everyone knows there are wolves in the woods. Only the path is safe. Remember the wolves in the woods._)


End file.
